Unbelievable facts
“Plague on both your houses!”
This famous phrase is spoken by Mercutio at the end of Act I of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. And we all know what eventually happened to Romeo, Juliet, and the warring Montague and Capulet clans…
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To be sure, cursed families and difficult lineages existed long before Shakespeare. The ancient Greeks had more curses than the entire Kennedy clan, from the House of Atreus to the mythical House of Thebes, in which poor Oedipus kills his father, marries his mother, and dazzles himself. Is the curse an explanation for life's failures, or is it something supernatural, inexplicable that can hit wealthy families with power and a good gene pool, but at the same time marked by excessive pride and indecency?
Absolutely all families, from royal dynasties to children of industry, face misfortune and misfortune. The more famous and influential the family is, the more attention is paid to it, and the skeletons in the closet do not last long. However, some families are real magnets for misfortunes.
Generation after generation suffer from tragedies on such a scale as if their lineages are cursed. As Leo Tolstoy said, happy families are all alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Kennedy family
Media representatives called the sequence of tragic departures of members of an extremely influential American clan “Kennedy's ancestral curse”.
The Kennedy couple, politician and businessman Joseph Kennedy Sr. and his wife Rosa Fitzgerald Kennedy, had 9 children. Four of them died at a young age. The couple's first son, Joseph, was a military pilot who died in the skies during World War II.
John Kennedy, who became the 35th US President, was shot dead in November 1963 in Dallas. There are still many hypotheses and mysteries surrounding his murder. President Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline had four children, two of whom died immediately: their first child was stillborn, and their last newborn boy died two days after births.
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Their third child, John, died in a plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean. He was 39 years old. Only the president's daughter, writer and attorney Caroline Kennedy, is alive today.
But let us return to the tragic stories in the lives of the first generation of this family. It is impossible not to mention the president's younger sister, Rosemary Kennedy. At 23, she had to undergo a lobotomy, which left her disabled and spent the rest of her life in a psychiatric hospital.
Joseph Kennedy's fifth child, Kathleen, died at the age of 28 in a terrible car accident. US Senator and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were shot dead five years after John's older brother died. The circumstances of the murder remain unclear. After he was shot, Robert was alive for almost 24 hours. He passed away after turning off the drugs that kept him alive.
Robert Kennedy had 11 children. David, his fourth son, died of a drug overdose at age 28.
Family curses
Onassis family
Aristotle Onassis and Jacqueline Kennedy
This famous Greek clan is also called the cursed one. Kennedy's widow Jacqueline joined the clan in 1968. Opera singer Maria Callas is considered to be the author of the curse. She was Onassis's lover, and she learned from newspapers that Aristotle was marrying Jacqueline.
The first wife of a multi-billionaire shipowner, Athena Livanos, died at the age of 45. The official version of the woman's death was a heart attack, however, people close to her were sure that Athena committed suicide because she could not withstand the blows of fate: Aristotle's regular infidelity, a difficult divorce followed, two failed marriages after that, and most importantly, the death of his 25-year-old son Alexander in a car accident in 1973.
Aristotle with his wife, son Alexander and daughter Christina
Athena and Aristotle's daughter Christina was found dead in 1988. Like her 37-year-old mother, she was also diagnosed with a heart attack. However, Christina has had two unsuccessful suicide attempts, so many people say that the woman was poisoned herself after all.
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Aristotle did not have children in marriage to Jacqueline, so today's only heir to the Onassis empire is Christina's daughter, 33-year-old Athena Roussel.
Athena Roussel
The story of Hemingway
Hemingway family
As you know, Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He took his own life at age 61 after struggling for years with depression, which was his family's most real curse.
Ernest's father, despite having a happy marriage and a very good relationship with his children, also killed himself. All the children in Hemingway Sr.'s family also committed suicide. Ernest and Ursula committed suicide as a result of the pressure of depression, and the writer's older brother Leicester shot himself in the forehead after learning that his legs should be amputated due to diabetes.
Ernest Hemingway's granddaughter Margot Hemingway
Ernest's granddaughter, Margo, was an actress and model, and was also clinically ill. At the age of 42, she was poisoned.
Family Curse Line
Gandhi family
Indira Gandhi was India's first female Prime Minister and the second in the history of the world. The woman was killed by her own Sith bodyguards, who thus decided to avenge her for suppressing the uprisings of their co-religionists.
Rajeev, Indira's eldest son, was also assassinated. He was bombed by a suicide bomber because he brought Indian troops into Sri Lanka. Tragedy happened in 1991.
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Sanjay, Indira's youngest son, died while his mother was still alive. A plane crash took his life.
In India, there is a legend that says that the Gandhi family brought the curse on themselves by violating caste law. Both the politician herself and her sons entered into forbidden marriages: Indira married a descendant of Iranian immigrants, her eldest son married an Italian woman, and the youngest married a Sikh daughter.
The fate of the family
Lee family
Bruce Lee with his wife and son Brandon
The iconic actor and martial artist Bruce Lee passed away at a very young age, he was 33 years old. He died after taking a headache pill, which caused him to develop cerebral edema. The circumstances of his death remained a mystery: some said that the pill he took contained an incompatible dose of meprobamate and aspirin, others claimed that his death was staged envious people.
Shortly before his death, Bruce began working on Game of Death, in which he not only played the main role, but also produced, wrote and directed. Due to Bruce's death, work on the film was suspended.
However, later, new director Robert Klause resumed his work. Prior to that, he worked with Bruce on the movie “Out the Dragon”. The director almost completely rewrote the story, in which Lee's character also dies. Footage from the actor's funeral was inserted into the film.
The death of Bruce Lee's only son Brandon, which occurred on the set of the film “The Raven” in March 1993, is also a fatal accident. The team worked on the final shots when Brandon's hero was to be killed by his enemy Fanboy, played by Michael Massey.
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By a fateful coincidence, the gun from which Michael shot Brandon had a plug, which, when shot with a blank cartridge, was in the actor's stomach, killing him injuring.
Brandon's mother sued the film company. She won the case, accusing the owners of negligence. No charges were filed against Michael Massey, but this still did not save him from prolonged depression. The murder scene was shot anew with an understudy out of respect for the victim's family.
The fate of the Brando family
Brando family
Christian Devi Brando with his father Marlon Brando
The mother of the handsome and talented Marlon suffered from alcoholism, and that's why she died. Brando's first wife, Anna Kashfi, who was also an actress, was a drug addict and alcoholic. This marriage gave birth to Christian Devi Brando, who followed in his mother's footsteps and became a drug addict.
Christian later shot Tarita's friend, his sister, who was the daughter of Marlon and his third wife. Christian spent 5 years in prison and died of pneumonia at the age of 50. Tarita fell ill with schizophrenia and hanged herself when she was 25.
Gucci Fashion House
Gucci family
There was one tragic death in the history of this dynasty, which made the family think about cursing. In March 1995, Maurizio Gucci, the grandson of the legendary founder of the house of Gucci, Guccio Gucci, was shot dead in central Milan. Maurizio was 45 years old.
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The first suspect was the Italian mafia, but it turned out that the customer was the man's wife, Patricia Reggiani, whom he cheated on with a young beauty. Patricia feared that if he married his mistress, she and her two daughters would be left without a livelihood. She was sentenced to 29 years in prison.
At the end of her term, she was asked to mow it a little bit, but Patricia replied that she would rather be a slacker here than a hard worker on the loose. She stressed that she has never worked and is not going to do so.
However, the curse did not affect Patricia herself or her daughters, who received their inheritance. It fell on lawyers who decided to take on Patricia's case during the appeals period. Anyone who started studying documents immediately suffered from headaches, rashes, and nausea. Skeptics said that standard microbes that bred on old papers were to blame, but superstitious lawyers still try not to get involved in this case.
Romanov family
Emperor Nicholas II and his family
The curse of this kind is related to the historical legend about the murder of Marina Mnishek, a three-year-old son, who was the wife of two False Dmitriev (they were impostors who pretended to be Dmitry, a son Ivan the Terrible, who died at a young age).
Ivan, the three-year-old son of False Dmitry II, was executed immediately after Mikhail Romanov, the founder of the Romanov family, ascended the throne in 1613. This was done in order to avoid a possible uprising in the future. Legend has it that according to the prediction of Mnishek, murders in the family will continue until all members of the Romanov family die.
Marina Mnishek
In fact, the stronger sex in the family was not in good health. In the last years of his life, Mikhail was very weak and moved in a wheelchair. He was 49 years old. He had 10 children, six of whom died in infancy and childhood.
Mikhail had an heir, Alexey, a father of 16 children, but none of his 10 daughters found a life partner (three of them died as babies). Of the three sons who survived to the reign, only Peter I survived. Peter's elder brother Fedor died at the age of 20, leaving no heirs, and Ivan V, who inherited the throne together with Peter, He passed away at the age of 30.
Peter I
As you know, Peter arrested his son Alexey for treason, who later died in captivity. As a result, Peter deprived himself of his heir, thereby marking the beginning of palace coups. The 19th century in the history of the Romanovs began with a murder. Paul, Catherine II's son, was beaten to death by officers in his own palace. Alexander I, Paul's son, knew about the impending murder of his father, although he did not take a direct part in it.
Alexander I died without leaving any heirs (he had two daughters who died as children), so the throne went to his brother, Nicholas I, whose son Emperor Alexander II died at the hands of terrorists. At the site of Alexander II's death, his son Alexander III built the Church of the Savior on Blood.
Alexander II
Alexander III himself, like most Romanov men, did not live to see his 50th birthday, and what happened to his son Nicholas II is still unknown.
A number of unusual coincidences are also considered a curse. For example, the history of the Romanov family dates back to the Ipatievsky Monastery in Kostroma, when Mikhail was coronated, and the family ended in the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where the royal family was shot by the Bolsheviks. It should also be noted that the family began and ended with the name Mikhail. It is known that Emperor Nicholas abdicated in favor of Michael, his younger brother, who in turn signed an abdication in favor of the Provisional Government.